I visited Europe’s cheapest wine destination – with glasses of plonk for £2 and help-yourself fridges on hiking trails

IT sounds almost too good to be true but in this river valley strung like a harp with vineyards, you can eat, and drink, for under £10.

Winemakers in these stunning villages with pastel-painted houses even place help-yourself honesty fridges on footpaths.

Moreover, in season those winemakers run their own improvised taverns in barns and courtyards serving traditional farmworkers’ grub washed down with fruity whites priced as little as £2 a glass.

This earthly paradise is a spectacular 22-mile stretch of the Austrian Danube called the Wachau, about 70 miles upriver from Vienna.

There’s nothing secret about this UNESCO-registered valley, but most of its visitors are on Danube cruises intent on Vienna or Budapest, so they get barely more than a glimpse as they come gliding through.

The Wachau, and its lip-smackingly fruity Grüner Veltliner wines, deserves a lot more than this.

Last year I too was one of those cruise transients. It was during a brief layover by the Wachau’s prettiest village, Dürnstein, that I wandered down the riverbank, heard the sounds of clinking glassware, and found myself on a bench in an orchard, drinking a chilled white that seemed impossibly cheap and delicious.

I’d just been seduced by my first heuriger, a word which means ‘new wine’, often drawn straight from the barrel.

This one was run by the Leonhartsberger family, quite a coincidence given that crusader Richard the Lionheart had been in Dürnstein, too.

Within a couple of months I was back, intent on exploring the Wachau’s villages, its hiking trails, and sampling some more bargain wines.

There are, apparently, some 250 craftsman winemakers in the valley, their output too small for wider distribution, so they sell instead from their own cellar doors, alongside a variety of local cheeses, hams, sausages and pickles.

According to the calendar, key villages like Weissenkirchen had 18 heuriger to choose from, and Spitz had 27, and although they take it in turns to open, I wasn’t going to go thirsty.

Over the next handful of days, travelling by a mix of rental bike, local bus and train, I managed to visit half a dozen.

In Weissenkirchen, for example, I tried a sheep’s cheese salad at Trautsamwieser (£5.50, trautsamwieser.at) which has a spectacular little terrace just above the village rooftops, and was full of jolly locals getting pie-eyed on wine that cost £1.80 a glass.

In Spitz I tried heuriger Özelt (weingut-oezelt.at) where a grumpy waiter brought me a platter of Blunz’n, local blood sausage (£6.50) served with grated horseradish, and the wine came in quarter litres (£3.80).

And in heuriger Hamböck (heuriger-krems.at) in the outskirts of Krems, the main gateway to the Wachau, I ordered the grammelschmalzbrot, bread slathered in pork lard and topped with onions and paprika.

Thanks to the trusting locals, I was able to watch the sun go down over the Danube, and raise a nicely chilled glass to the departing day

It was a lot better than it sounds: the onions gave it crunch, the lard gave it body, the paprika gave it spice, but – as often in these things – the location had extra magic, with a view across the rooftops to where the abbey of Gottweig straddled the hilltop like a baroque fortress.

Plus the Grüner Veltliner here cost just £1.80 a glass.

But perhaps the best moment was after a day spent hiking the Panoramaweg, up through beautifully tended vineyard terraces into a little side valley by Spitz.

I ended up in the evening on a modest hill grandiosely called Thousand Bucket Mountain, so slathered in vineyards that it surely produced far more buckets than a measly thou.

Thousand Bucket is spectacularly located right by the riverside, with a couple of benches and a little stone hut on the top.

The view was magnificent, but it had another surprise up its sleeve, because inside the stone hut was a fridge filled with bottles of wine, payment for which (by card) was completely honesty-based.

Back home, a help-yourself minibar on a hilltop would be ransacked before you could say blood sausage – but not here.

Thanks to the trusting locals, I was able to watch the sun go down over the Danube, and raise a nicely chilled glass to the departing day.